The death of USENET was uncontrollable spam, and that it was coopted into a binary media distribution network. For a decentralized discussion forum, the overhead was absolutely massive, and nobody wanted to pay for that and receive no direct revenue.
Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap some ads on it.
This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills, unfortunately.
You could avoid most of the binaries by not distributing some alt.* groups, and use existing email filters for the spam. As for making a buck, ISPs could just tack on a fee for running NNTP servers. Alas, we have shitty web forums wrapped in ads instead.
Usenet never stood a chance. It was invented in the days when net access was something of a privilege that could be revoked if a user did not behave in a socially acceptable way. As such, it was acutely vulnerable to spam and abuse. What proportion of Usenet traffic consisted of porn and pirated binaries in the late nineties? Is it any surprise that ISPs ,fearing they might be held accountable for distributing such material, started cutting off their Usenet service?
The good news are: Usenet still exists. There are free NNTP servers that host most non-binaries groups. Many groups are abandoned, but some are quite lively. Every time I visit, I am struck by the fact that no website forum approaches the ease of use of a good threaded newsreader, and I am amused when I see each new generation of coders, ignorant of the past, trying to re-implement an incomplete, flawed replica of what once existed.
The best characterization might be to say that reddit is a “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast.
What does this even mean? Someone ultimately has power over Reddit, and it can't be Reddit itself since they sold. So who is it? The blog doesn't answer that.
> Then in 2012, reddit was spun out into a re-incorporated independent entity with its own board and control of its own finances, hiring a new CEO and bringing back co-founder Alexis Ohanian to serve on the board.
Right now, Advance Publications[0], which owns Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of an independent Reddit.
<pedantic>No, actually we lost USENET (although it still exists and is used), and it has been replaced by a website owned by DejaNews(Google).</pedantic> But yeah, I'm with you.
I think the real problem is that Reddit's core mod tools are pretty woeful and age-old problems haven't been fixed.
/r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have been having for years.
Some examples:
* Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)
* Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".
* Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.
* Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.
* Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.
* want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.
and on and on.
I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.
Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.
> * Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.
Reminds me of the takeovers in IRC (quakenet). There are so many channels/subreddits that admin can't deal with all the problems.
Yeah, it's the same phenomenon. Reddit should make administering all the little fiefdoms the responsibility of the mods and should only have to step in under extraordinary circumstances. But right now they're needed for relatively trivial/banal/stupid issues constantly and it's been that way for too long.
There are a lot of limitations to subreddits, so long as they're public. You _do_ have the option of creating a private subreddit, which limits exposure to certain behaviors.
I agree that stronger subreddit controls would be useful. All I can say is that reddit serves a function, it doesn't serve all functions, and the site's resources are limited (reddit itself isn't profitable).
That said, I've found it useful as a space in between a discussion site and a blog with a personal subreddit on which I tightly monitor and manage activity. Doesn't keep the downvoters from showing up occasionally.
The automoderator bot is supposed to make a lot of automated mod tasks much easier.
The only times I had to contact the admins (sex pest approaching children; sub linked to from other sub causing massive brigading) I got quick responses that took action.
The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope, but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws).
I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to ignore their own TOS.
You got quick action because the admins faced a legal and monetary penalty for not acting. And reddit has gotten massive bad press in the past for attracting kiddy fiddlers.
If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.
I've also had next to zero response from the admins on a few issues as well. My guess is that arbitrage is right, there was a legal issue they needed to address. But for run of the mill issues like downvote brigades, good luck getting anything useful out of them. I've usually just gotten something to the effect of "we're too busy for this" or "tough luck"
The bigger problem is that mods should have log access themselves to up/down votes so they can root out bad behavior on their own and then have the tools to deal with it. Mod powers are incredibly slim on reddit and they arguably shouldn't be.
(Using asterisks makes it a little hard to quote you. You may want to use - instead.)
- Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)
Downvotes have been in Reddit's DNA since the beginning. This is a reasonable stance.
- Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".
Good advice! What else are they going to do? You can't punish a crowd.
- Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.
Maybe a way to transfer sub ownership would be good. Though if the creator decides they're not interested in the sub they themselves created, maybe creating your own and sticking a redirect message on the frontpage is in order.
- Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.
A sub isn't merely property of those who created it. It's community property. Personally I think even being able to set a sub to 'private' after it's been created is too much, because it's equivalent to a delete. People shouldn't be able to delete the hard work of a community.
- Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.
If Reddit were to show the actual number of upvotes per post, people might feel a little daunted. Right now people think a mere 2,000 upvotes are all that's needed to get to the front page of a default sub, rather than the more realistic 80,000+. They may lose interest the same way most people aren't interested in the presidential elections: they feel their vote doesn't matter.
- want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.
AutoModerator seems pretty good for this, isn't it?
I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.
I don't know why this story keeps floating in regards to /r/technology, but this isn't it. Some moderator of /r/technology, when responding to censorship claims, responded roughly "Reddit is a place for cat pictures and insulting people. Stop getting so worked up." They didn't take their job seriously, and no one could do a thing about it. That's what pissed people off, and it became pretty clear there was no accountability internal to their mod team.
> Downvotes have been in Reddit's DNA since the beginning. This is a reasonable stance.
No it's not. There are plenty of subs that have lots of reason to not have downvotes (or any votes at all). It won't affect much algorithm-wise because the post decay will eventually push things off the front page no matter what.
For example, there are entire groups of subs designed for self help, support group type activities that get overpowered by trolls downvoting everything and making it uncomfortable for people to even post in there. The only lever mods have is to take the sub private, but then they might
a) either exclude people who need the group
b) accidentally keep in one of the trolls
> Good advice! What else are they going to do? You can't punish a crowd.
The same thing the admins do, find the brigade and ban them from the sub. Problem solved. But as a mod, you have zero ability to do this and are at the whim of the admin staff to do anything about it. Good luck running a sub when you have a troll downvoting every post to -6 right off the bat.
> A sub isn't merely property of those who created it. It's community property. Personally I think even being able to set a sub to 'private' after it's been created is too much, because it's equivalent to a delete. People shouldn't be able to delete the hard work of a community.
There are tons of subs that were literally the creation of one person, and have only ever had the one person in them. They were experimenting with something, or screwing around or whatever, and they should be able to take it down rather than have reddit aggregate it into overall promotional numbers "look how popular reddit is! we have tens of thousands of subs!"
> If Reddit were to show the actual number of upvotes per post, people might feel a little daunted. Right now people think a mere 2,000 upvotes are all that's needed to get to the front page of a default sub, rather than the more realistic 80,000+. They may lose interest the same way most people aren't interested in the presidential elections: they feel their vote doesn't matter.
The fuzzing is fine at large numbers where small % up/down don't really affect things much, but at small numbers it gets frequently weird when number are off by 10 or 20%. It's even weirder when you just create a sub and suddenly you have ~6 users here now. It's not the right way to deal with it and if they're that inaccurate, just remove them entirely.
> AutoModerator seems pretty good for this, isn't it?
It's fine, but it should be part of the core mod tools. It's beyond ridiculous that it required a flaky bot that you invite and add as a mod and configure through wiki pages to do the work the core code should be able to handle on it's own.
> I don't know why this story keeps floating in regards to /r/technology, but this isn't it. Some moderator of /r/technology, when responding to censorship claims, responded roughly "Reddit is a place for cat pictures and insulting people. Stop getting so worked up." They didn't take their job seriously, and no one could do a thing about it. That's what pissed people off, and it became pretty clear there was no accountability internal to their mod team.
Yeah, the flip side is when a mod, or mod group gets too controlling/lax, there's really very little the user community can do about it. I bet that the only reason any action was taken at all was because the sub was default.
Reddit had another moderator scandal that happened son after the /r/technology incident: On Reddit, it was recently discovered that a moderator on r/hearthstone was upvoting links to a certain Hearthstone fansite and flagging all others (even when the other sites have better info). That site was owned by gaming network Curse, and it was discovered that said moderator was employed by Curse. It wasn't pretty. (more information here: http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizz... )
The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the best system nowadays.
I think moderator elections are a bad idea. First, participation will never be very high. Second, there is no way to make the elections reliable.
Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless without user engagement.
Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?
Do not HN also use a very similar list? I know they don't get deleted, but I remember their position decaying faster compared to threads without those keywords.
HN has a penalized domains list. (one such penalized domain is medium.com -- stop writing posts there if you want your post to hit the front page) [0]
Unlike /r/technology, it's still possible to hit the front page with a submission from a penalized domain, it's just much more unlikely. (will only really happen on the weekends when it's a slow news day)
There is also something beyond just penalizing domains. I tried submitting a link to something at chess.com and it was immediately marked dead. I emailed the admins, and found out that chess.com submissions were indeed banned from HN. They said that they unbanned it, and told me to go ahead and submit the link again.
I had, by the time, decided that the story wasn't actually all that interesting, so never did resubmit it.
Some sites are banned. Most of these are spam. Others aren't spam, exactly, but have been the source of many bad-for-HN articles. We also ban things like novelty sites.
However, for mixed bag sites where you get a lot of fluff and also some solid pieces, we don't ban the site. That is what minimaxir is talking about.
Back in its heyday (Summer 2012), Medium submissions had a very low signal-to-noise ratio, with everyone jumping on the pseudointellectual bandwagon, with a high dose of pseudo.
Nowadays, the number of medium.com submissions is lower, but the ratio of quality remains the same.
Thanks for that. That seems a shame because my only exposure to Medium is the quality posts that actually are shared to me or make it to the first/second page of HN.
I had assumed the quality of most writing on the platform was quite high.
And that's where the confirmation bias and halo effect come in. :P
Many startups use Medium to do the same low-quality content marketing that they could do with a normal Wordpress blog, but most Wordpress blog don't have giant header images and a serif typeface.
Snowden's revelations set off a broad distrust of US tech products and services and have a multi-tens-of-billions impact on the tech economy and investing. Whoever can fix this will make a more valuable contribution to tech than a smart watch or smart TV ever will.
Questioning whether Tim Cook is capable of running Apple is OK because he didn't help start disastrous wars, but questioning the thudding tone-deafness of putting Condi Rice on the DropBox board is "political?" Or is it sensitivity over DropBox acquiring some YC companies?
Because the politics of it is so intractable, it is very likely that the privacy issue will have a large technology component. That is, mass surveillance will be reconsidered only when mass surveillance isn't valuable.
Overall, the biggest threats to tech and investing in the US are the surveillance/security state, over-militarization, wars, and the things like education they prevent being properly funded.
The fact that you just started a pointed, partisan political subthread in an otherwise boring metathread isn't at all evidence that HN should avoid politics. No, I don't see how anyone could come to that conclusion.
Partisan? Which party do you think I registered for? You will almost certainly get it wrong.
I am all for making money. I am not for wishing away problems, which many people here seem to think will work: if we wish hard enough, we can make believe we have privacy when we have none, so that we can continue to sell both "security" and "forensics."
I agree on this. But there is a distinction between tech news that involves government, and debating politics. The Snowden revelations and its ilk aren't the product of theoretical agenda debates between differently minded political ideologies,they were reality. And I wouldn't consider a discussion on what the (as an example) US government does to be politics, it is when you get into the "what the government should do under this hypothetical situation" theory that you approach a line.
But then that still leaves the entire spectrum of tech related policies that would cause tremendous damage or benefit, which is still heavily tech related, at least as much as "is Samsung going to use OLED or IPS in their next smart phone".
While that is good and all, maybe it would be more in the hacker spirit if they did it open an transparently. If reddit isn't destroyed by this move, maybe HN can survive too.
Politics is way more important than anything we discuss here, by and large. You open the floodgates, and it'll crowd out articles about Erlang's concurrency vs Node.js. Few people care about that, but everyone has an opinion on things like abortion, gun control, health care systems, gay marriage and so on.
I did. You're suggesting there's some sort of clean distinction between tech and politics. I agree that politics with no tech is off topic. But I disagree that there's a clear distinction. We can't be forever talking about changing the world and disrupting billion-dollar industries and pretending that those aren't political acts.
What floodgates? We had a wave of "chemical weapons rotting in the Baltic Sea" posts this morning. WTF does that have to do with tech? Apparently the filters didn't recognize those as OT.
HN does not have only to do with tech and startups. That's the reason why PG changed its name from "Startup News" ages ago. Chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea are an example of something (potentially, at least) interesting that might well be at home on the site. (Why there were two stories is a separate issue.) Another example is the Chinese irrigation system from the third century BC currently on the front page. Such a story is on topic for HN.
Political stories aren't necessarily off-topic either. However, they come with the risk of degenerating into flamewars that violate HN's values. We can't afford to let that happen much because it will change the community for the worse. How do we know that? Because it already has.
The question of "politics on HN" is not primarily about defining what is/isn't on topic. It's empirical and practical: under certain influences, the site degenerates badly. Therefore, lessen such influences.
We have a good definition of "degenerate": to violate HN's values. And we know what our values are: intellectual substance and personal civility. (The other thing we talk a lot about is signal/noise ratio, but you can derive that from the other two.)
(later edit: I've used the term "political overlap" in subsequent comments making this point)
For some definition of works. I come here from hckrnews.com, which displays all submissions in chronological order, and it surprises me how much very interesting stuff gains 20-30 upvotes and still falls off the front page before older content with similar upvote counts.
Of course, it's ycombinator's web site, so it's their choice, but a lot of interesting articles and discussion are just... lost.
I'm not talking about /new, I'm talking about articles which received a non-trivial number of upvotes (enough to land on the front page in the first place), which are pushed off the front page while an older story with an identical, or lower, number of upvotes remains on the front page.
Whatever the mechanism, good posts and discussions are being lost.
I don't think that's true. I have showdead on and very few comments and articles are dead. Reddit has a lot of moderation, you just don't usually see it because it's done in secret.
There is such a list, but there is almost nothing on it. At this point we could probably get rid of it, since it was only created when the site was being overwhelmed—I mean front-page-entirely-about-one-thing overwhelmed—and that deluge has since receded.
From that, you can probably guess the entire list. :)
Yes, the difference is, most HN readers aren't stupid enough to complain about this. Or just remember how terrible the site was when every other article was about NSA/Snowden.
It does, but for obvious reasons (access to the source and effectively a single "sub"), the HN mods have a much finer degree of control over how this works. From "decay a tiny bit faster than normal" to "complete ban"
You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy" topics.
They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit. One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords.
I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all (looking at you /r/funny).
And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.
> And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.
I agree, and it just reminds me of how Something Awful is probably the best quality community I've been a member of, and that's mostly down to its $5 joining fee and fascist mods. It's just a pity that that didn't scale and 4chan and later reddit ate its lunch.
I agree that one of the major failures with reddit is lack of moderation. (Highly inconsistent moderation, at best.) The problem is, it can't be fixed because of the attitude of so many of its users that moderation equals censorship. Appealing to youth is a double-edged sword.
Reddits designed to moderate its self. This has it's downfalls, but for the most part things that aren't related to a subreddit don't make it to the top unless the users want it to. IMO Snowden and the NSA is heavily related to technology and banning those terms was one of the dumbest moves they could have made. The reason they get upvoted is because the community cares about that kind of stuff. Plus the comments in a snowden thread on r/technology actually discuss the technological aspects of it while r/politics commenters focus on other aspects.
Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?
It was less the "censorship" and more the complete collapse of the mod team that led to /r/technology's removal from the default set. See the SubredditDrama recap [1] for more information about the situation there, and the leaked notice from one of the reddit admins [2] which gives the reasoning behind the action.
Without better moderator tools to manage large subreddits they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads seeing how majority of bitcoin, tesla etc related stories was not really for /r/technology. Even for that they had to use 3rd party tool.
Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology - and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories.
It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that pretty much any topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be posted in /r/technology.
On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is, even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...
>they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads
Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?
It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
>Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?
No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!" threads or remove them as soon as they're posted.
>Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top
That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see "NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was posted and allowed by moderators.
Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice which subreddit it is.
People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with "false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission?
>If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.
Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it to the top.
And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up votes too.
____
tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when dealing with large amount of voters.
If the 2 items on the frontpage are irrelevant for the subreddit that would make it impossible to post threads which are actually relevant.
Relevance of the posts on frontpage is also affected by problems I described above, meaning the thread that shouldn't be posted in /r/technology has (almost) equal chance of being on frontpage as the one that's relevant.
I have no idea how to solve the issue, maybe a modqueue like page where moderators can isolate specific threads until they're approved?
But just removing all threads if 2 (similar) already exist has too many issues.
> Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top.
That's the problem with social media aggregators. Sometimes the hive mind isn't the best judge of quality. (this happens on all aggregators, including Hacker News itself; that's why having the flag option be so potent in killing threads is necessary).
Joe Rogan recently had alexis ohanian (4.11) and then David Seaman (4.16) on his podcast and David Seaman brought up the fact that the technology subreddit was using a bot to censor certain keywords. With over a million listeners listening to that podcast I think that may have had some influence in getting more people aware and eventually leading to this decision.
This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod script.
When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple.
It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore.
I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.
On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.
On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.
I agree with your (and the parent's) sentiment wholeheartedly, and I'm really upset that this has become the case here and on Reddit. The surveillance is a critical issue that should be talked about ad infinitum until adequately addressed. Instead we stick our head in the sand and self-censor to appease the people that don't care about it.
I agree. Any form of moderation that uses a blanket term to apply a penalty is horrible imo (except when it comes to blatant derogatory and inciteful terms). Perhaps a better way to do it would be to check if certain terms are already on the front page and only apply penalties to new posts with that term while a post with that term is on the front page.
There are a ton of better ways than auto penalizing based on a blanket censorship system.
PG has straight up admitted that there is classification of articles (automated or manual) and that penalties are applied to certain classifications, such as "political". There is no real denial.
> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty."
> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing."
I'm not saying it's a good thing (for that matter, I'm not saying that it's bad either). I'm just pointing out that HN has been open that this is going on; it's not something that is denied or excused.
Then let the community downvote weak content instead of blocking all Tesla articles. Its really a desperate move to block something like Tesla in a technology forum because of the occasional link-bait. 99% of reddit's success is based on users knowing what they like and upvoting good stuff and downvoting bad stuff.
One of reddit's larger issues is that weak stuff does sometimes get upvote, but the top comment in the thread is almost always a pretty fair criticism of why that article sucks. This is true of almost all subreddits and not something unique to /r/technology.
To be fair, a lot of the "allowed" content under these mod rules isn't much better. Cherry picking Tesla linkbait as justification for these heavy-handed rules really isn't fair.
Hacker News does the exact same thing. Character strings like 'nsa' and possibly 'bitcoin' are heavily penalized by HN's algorithm. As are links to many sites.
It also seems like it was more a case of the head mods being lazy and not wanting to bring on more moderators. So they tried to automate moderation with AutoModerator.
The default status isn't as powerful with registered users as with unregistered lurkers. Hitting the main site for the first time will bring one to the defaults, and (likely) influences who joins or does not join the site.
In the context of a news aggregator? Pretty much as soon as the company was founded and named. Nikola Tesla has been dead for decades, there isn't much news about him these days.
Funny how getting reddit to take action in their most toxic communities had traditionally been a teeth-pulling affair, but censorship actually gets them to move fast.
This is just one of basically countless examples of how the Reddit model of moderation does not scale. Moderators are chosen by other moderators, and the subs become fiefdoms.
The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and often highly biased people.
Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation, etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list of things you aren't allowed to post is huge ( http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules ). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so they should be less subjective imo.
I agree with you, however /r/Games was explicitly created to be heavily moderated. The original /r/gaming isn't moderated nearly as much and a lot of people dislike it.
This is slightly off topic but I spend a lot of time on /r/bitcoin (I have done for about two years now). Over the past 60 days there has been a sustained attack by some group or entity, I am sure of this. The subtilty of attack is really astonishing, I never thought that I would witness something with coordination that seems on a scale of a nation state. These users are employing advanced techniques to trip up and stall discussion, causing in-fighting, promote other agendas (really gently) and just generally destroy the group. In times like this we need heavy moderation to stop it in it's tracks until everything clears up.
This sounds really paranoid. Do you have some concrete evidence? What does "coordination on a scale of a nation state" even look like with respect to a subreddit?
I agree on the surface it seems paranoid, here are my data points-
I'm a reasonable person of sound body and mind and very well socialised (I'm certain that I don't have a mental illness).
I've been on the sub since there were 20k users, there are now 120k
I've helped countless newbies and formed relationships with other long term users of the sub who also have a high reputation. I've made many high quality posts on bitcoin data analysis (and a few crappy memes along the way).
Something is definitely different in the past few months, and a lot of the other old timers would agree with me, the subject matter is not normal.
I have loads of anecdotal "Wait a minute, that not the way things are meant to work" situations, where some comments are being downvoted and upvoted abnormally. Some comments are meant to only confuse you or deride the conversation and bring it off topic. Some threads are calling into question the Mods and their motives. Some comments on threads are pushing the traditional banking system benefits. There has been an influx of 0 day users who seem to speak on authority about financial instruments. These are not trolls. Some users will reply with what seems like a positive post and then flip completely 180 degrees by the end of their reply.
What I'm trying to say is that the human neural network pattern matching machine is incredibly good at finding inconsistencies, my alarm bells are ringing, there is some organisation at work in the sub.
I would like to start gathering data on the extend of this by comparing users account age, their topic of conversation and the techniques they use. I'll need some help from my trusted friends on /r/bitcoin and I'm still coming up with the process on the best way to collect information to prove or disprove my hypothesis.
Are you sure this isn't just the result of a 6x growth? As Bitcoin and the subreddit becomes more popular, wouldn't you expect more people of various backgrounds and with various goals to join?
It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a vocal determined minority; or a bunch of noobs; or a bunch of trolls. (And when I say "bunch", I mean a number that's in the double-digits.)
>It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a vocal determined minority
Very true. It doesn't really take many upvotes to make it to the front page of a sub-reddit, just a high up-to-down ratio. Reddit would be an easy target for manipulation by a small group if they really wanted to.
My idea: have a default post sorting algorithm, but create an add-on that allows users to create their own sorting algorithm. Most likely users will find the best algorithm, share it, and spread it, but their would also be many algorithms in use, so you have multiple systems you would have to game.
That's a really cool idea but I don't see it ever happening. The admins are really conservative about major site features. It took them years to fix the sign error bug on the sorting algorithm when it was publicly known.
Only comments are ranked by upvote to downvote ratio. Posts are ranked by total upvotes plus the time.
Hell, even if it is a determined effort to undermine /r/bitcoin, it could just as likely be an attack by proponents of other altcoins!
I saw a comment here the other day about how "Bitcoin old money" was actively trying to keep altcoins down and came to a stark realization (again) that there's really nothing new under the sun.
Oh, it definitely happens. It's easier to spot on low-traffic subs because a single topic that matches the right keywords will suddenly blow up with both a spike in upvotes and dozens or hundreds of heavily opinionated comments.
The tactics are well known to the financial system. Penny stock boards, for example, are full of engineered disinformation because all participants are competing to manipulate the market. I believe the sockpuppets used for reddit are directed in some more autonomous fashion, though.
>What I'm trying to say is that the human neural network
>pattern matching machine is incredibly good at finding
>inconsistencies, my alarm bells are ringing, there is some
>organisation at work in the sub.
That a nice link and possibly true but equally there is compelling evidence to suggest people with experience are highly attuned to a change in environment despite being unable to articulate why.
This is a topic that I find particularly interesting. I have a strong confidence in my pattern matching abilities, for my day job I have to process pages of text on a daily basis with complete precision and very little allowances for error. I mine data like this for a living. I had to do the same to get my masters degree in science. It will take me some work to get the results of what is going on but I will build a model and see how I go.
I think he's onto something also. There will be some heavily upvoted story that soaks a lot of attention and the top comment will be some throwaway nonsense to promote the "Bitcoin is not serious/is just a scam/this is all bullshit" angle, any reasonable comments will be downvoted in righteous fury, any suggestions that something untoward is going on even more so.
This will go on for about a day, then a couple days later the exact same topic will come up again, and the response will be completely normal and the shill brigade obviously absent.
I actually have to agree, /r/bitcoin is one of the subreddit I spend most of my time in. There is kind of a "mob" that tries to promote bitcoin in all other subreddits and kill any unpleasant topic in /r/bitcoin.
But this is not surprising as some people are heavily invested in bitcoins. It just kills intelligent discussions on the subreddit sometimes.
Also, /r/technology wouldn't have been erased from the defaults if it was not for /r/bitcoin, everything started there (because the word "bitcoin" was banned from /r/technology).
Yes. Im sure it has nothing to do with bitcoin being a scam that is in the final stages after most of scammers/speculators already cashed out. What is left is a LOT of people that 'invested' at $800-1000 and are very angry now.
I am no fan of Bitcoin but that is pretty much nonsense given that one of the major holders of Bitcoin is IBM and it's subsidiaries who view it as a medium of exchange far removed from it's current guise.
Lazy moderation. An auto-delete filter for major news keywords is a poor way to run a news subreddit. They're throwing the baby out with the bath water.
They were also unlisted for having (as you can see) too small moderation team. This is said to be fault of /u/maxwellhill and /u/anutensil. (They are one of the oldest mods -- they have whole power).
I've seen the posts back then, there was a list of words that were not really relevant to /r/technology OR not about "new" technology.
two big examples : bitcoin, snowden
there were a lot of words on that list but those were the most discussed.
Bitcoin was relevant and it got plenty of article. I'm not surprised that the admin of /r/technology wanted to avoid all the spam and diminish the discussions on that topic after 2 years of bitcoin topics and a huge /r/bitcoin subreddit (which I'm part of).
Snowden? Well it was talked about there a lot. Now is definitely not the time to keep talking about him on /r/technology. There are plenty of other relevant subreddits for that.
I'm sure that they would have lifted the ban if something really relevant would have come around.
Also, a lot of people tend to mix "censorship" and "moderation". I agree with PARENT, this is moderation. You cannot expect "total free speech" in a private subreddit on a private website. Shouting "censorship" at everything you don't agree with is just not relevant.
And if we go down this road, the best subreddits are the ones that are the most moderated. /r/askscience and /r/games. No trolls, no racism.
Do you consider banning any link that has one of these keywords in the title decent moderation (aside from breaking)?
previous r/technology automatic filter list:
Restore the Fourth
NSA
Comcast
Anonymous
Time Warner
CISPA
SOPA
TPP
Swartz
FCC
Flappy
net neutrality
Bitcoin
GCHQ
Snowden
spying
Clapper
Congress
Obama
Feinstein
Wyden
anti-piracy
FBI
CIA
DEA
Condoleezza
EFF
ACLU
National Security Agency
Dogecoin
breaking
This makes me realise now why my AMA was denied and trolled into oblivion.
I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir) regarding the realities of the role.
Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to respond to my emails.
Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity.
Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were contained in my AMA.
We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from.
Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.